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I found this painting while looking for "images of reincarnation." Two things
immediately jump out; why are they all men? And why
is a cow further along than a horse? |
I've been a Buddhist for a while now, and while I didn't grow up in that culture and didn't ever go to Buddhist Sunday School, I've come to have my own opinions about things Buddhist-y, and maybe I'm right and maybe I'm wrong. (And maybe we won't ever know until we get to the other side, and maybe not even then, because what if there is no other side?) For example, meditation: Meditation is cool. Meditation is great for your brain, makes you feel good and helps you be nicer to other people, which is also cool. Furthermore, there is scientific proof that if you meditate an hour a day for a year, your blood pressure will drop, your heart rate will slow, and all kinds of other good things will happen to your body. So meditation is cool. That is my opinion, backed up by some science.
And here's my opinion about reincarnation, backed up by nothing in particular: I think Buddhism has the whole notion of reincarnation ever so slightly wrong.
I mean, the standard narrative is that being born a human is lucky, because it gives you a chance to work on your issues and become a better being overall. (Humans, as far as we know, are among the very few self-aware beings out there; there's some evidence that chimpanzees, some other primates, octopuses and dolphins are self-aware and may even Ask the Big Questions, but it's really impossible to know for sure because we can't communicate with them very well. For further exploration of this notion, check out
Jonathan Livingston Seagull.) If you're a good human, you're supposed to come back in the next life as a better human (meaning a better rank and position in society, or you'll have an easier life next time, or something like that). If you're not, you'll come back as a bug, or a snail, or maybe a samurai. (That's a Japanese take on the subject, anyway; a samurai is maybe the worst thing to be born as, because A. you know that killing a human being is the worst thing you can do, and B. you have to do it for a living.) I mean, if you need to have a system where the good get rewarded and the bad get punished, and you don't have a hell and a heaven to conveniently provide those things, you have to come up with something. Coming back as a bug/a higher ranking member of society sort of works. Sort of. But I don't think that's the deal.
Recently, because of some of my reading on how brains work and the nature of consciousness generally, I've come to believe that consciousness in general is kind of like soup. There's a big pot of consciousness percolating somewhere, and every time a living being is born, a ladle of soup gets poured into them, from human babies all the way down to microcelled organisms. Consciousness, anyway, doesn't seem to be a thing we're born with; it's a thing we receive from somewhere. Our brains are even filled with tiny receptive structures called microtubules to do this receiving, at least according to some scientists. When you die, your consciousness, and all its memories and dreams and so on, gets poured back into the soup.
This is why I think the Buddhist view of reincarnation can't be right. Firstly, Buddhists are not very convinced that that there's an "I" in each person that's transferred smoothly from one body to the next. In fact, a lot of Buddhists believe that the "I" is an illusion, and when we achieve enlightenment, what we realize is that there is no "I". Just "we." So if we're all "we", what's there to be transferred from one body to the next? Nothing. It's an illusion.
Secondly, back to the soup. A lot of people, especially as young children, have memories of past lives. (I do. You might or might not.) If there's no "I" going from one body to the next, how can people have memories of past lives? Well, if consciousness is soup,
we're all everybody. In fact, we're all every being that has ever been, every being that is and every being that will be, because our consciousness all comes from the soup. Lots of people have claimed that they used to be Napoleon, or some other famous person from the past, in a previous life. If we're all soup,
then they're all right. We have memories from each other, and somebody like Napoleon would necessarily have really vibrant ones (given how many lives he affected, and ended). So a lot of people would remember them. Comparatively fewer would remember being a housewife in the 1400s, a journalist in the 1870s or a crafty trilobite in the Pleistocine. It just wouldn't have been as vibrant, even if you were a darn fine trilobite with sharp black eyes and a penchant for dodging incoming meteorites.
In case you're wondering, I'm gonna keep my past-life stuff to myself, but I will tell you this; I was usually a guy. In fact, I'm not sure I've ever been a woman before, which would explain why I suck at it.
If the idea of a collective memory is giving you the heebie jeebies, though, ponder this:
Who ladles out the soup? Yes, the notion of a higher power of some kind still has room to exist in the Soup Theory of Consciousness. I just don't think it makes sense that we pass fully intact from one living being to the next. I mean, shouldn't something happen in between? Shouldn't there be some learning, or something? Like some sort of space to say, "Okay, I really screwed up there, but I did something pretty good right here." So you might say that being good, in life, means coming up with good things to add to the soup. The more good things you do for other beings, the better your addition to the soup, and then the whole soup will be slightly better, like if you sprinkled in just a little bit of Penzey's 4S Special Seasoning Salt.
But regardless of whether I'm right or wrong about reincarnation, we could all stand to be a little nicer to each other. And in any religion, isn't that the point?
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